Scar's mind was terrifyingly clear at this moment.
The wound on his temple pulsed with a throbbing pain, like a tiny, scorching hammer continuously tapping against his skull.
His head felt woozy, the edges of his vision dark and swaying, as if standing on a broken ship sailing through waves.
The entire left side of his face was fever-hot—not the heat of flushed excitement, but a real, raw heat tinged with the rusty tang of iron—blood was steadily seeping from the torn flesh, flowing over his brow bone, past the corner of his eye, winding down the grooves of his cheek, warm and sticky.
"They've started! We're finished—!!"
He tore open his already hoarse throat, hurling these words once more into the street gradually swallowed by dusk.
Every violent vibration of his vocal cords tugged at the wound on his head, bringing sharper stabs of pain.
And each time, a few drops of the warm liquid from his cheek, jolted by his shouting, would accelerate their fall, landing unerringly in the corner of his mouth opened wide by his roar, onto his tongue.
An indescribable taste.
Salty, metallic, carrying the scent of skin and dust, and a hint of something cold and iron-like—a rusty tang.
This flavor instantly seized his taste buds, mingling eerily with the content of his roar—that proclamation of destruction and end—forming a nauseating yet intensely real experience.
This was the taste of cost, of "capital" made tangible, flowing into his body.
Scar didn't have time to savor this complex, sickening taste. All his senses were focused on the burning gazes and stares around him.
One came from the eyes of the woman with an empty basket to his left, filled with fright and a flicker of shaken timidity.
Another, from several laborers ahead who had stopped walking, their eyes muddy, yet something deep within their weariness gently stirred by this blood-smeared, desperate cry of "finished."
Yet another, from an old man leaning against a wall diagonally behind him, his clouded eyes fixated on the still-bleeding wound on Scar's temple, his withered lips moving soundlessly for an instant.
These gazes were like red-hot needles, pricking his skin, branding his consciousness. He knew he had "hooked" them.
Fear was the best adhesive in Darenz's nights, and fresh blood paired with a cry of despair was the spark to ignite it.
"Where can we even run to! They're everywhere—!!!"
Using the last stored air in his lungs, he erupted with an even more forceful, tearing roar.
The sound echoed along the open street in the gathering twilight, and indeed brought the attention of more people.
More footsteps halted, more faces turned his way, more gazes converged. The heat in those stares was rising, beginning to mix with confusion, unease, and a simmering restlessness dragged forcibly from numbness.
Not enough.Not impactful enough.
Scar screamed at himself inwardly.
To make them truly move, just watching wasn't enough, just fear wasn't enough.
They needed to feel the same desperation, the same no way out! He needed more intense action, a more thorough performance.
He imagined himself as hunted prey, a cornered, dying beast, shifting his original full-force sprint into a stumbling gait from fear and injury, waving his arms as if pushing away unseen pursuers, flinging himself toward the denser part of the crowd in a struggling charge.
However—
"Ugh!"
A sharp sting shot up from the sole of his foot; his balance instantly lost.
In that moment of distraction—immersed in his self-created sense of hopelessness and watching the crowd—he had neglected his footing.
The edge of a loose, upturned flagstone had caught his unsteady, stumbling toe.
The forward momentum was still there, but his body was no longer under control.
He toppled forward like a felled log, straight down, with no cushioning, toward the hard, cold pavement.
The crowd he'd just captured reacted with startling unanimity.
As if moved by an invisible hand, they parted to either side, clearing an empty path to the ground. No one reached out to help.
only low exclamations and complex stares.
This fall would turn any sense of heroism or stirring rhetoric into farce and humiliation.
Scar desperately closed his eyes, bracing for the pain of impact and the icy chill of utter failure—
The next moment—
The expected graceless face-plant did not happen. The sense of weightless floating vanished abruptly.
Instead, a steady force shoved up from the side and halted his descent—forcibly, but just in time.
The force was large and somewhat rough, but utterly timely. Scar grunted at the jolt; dizziness worsened.
Then he felt himself half-dragged, half-held, his face-down body carefully but firmly flipped over.
His back did not meet the cold ground. Instead, he landed in a warm embrace—a lap that provided cushion and body heat.
His head and neck were placed on something soft; his upper body lay across someone's legs.
Still shaken, Scar pried open his heavy eyelids and peered upward through vision blurred by blood and sweat.
Against the deepening twilight, a familiar face loomed.
The face had none of its usual timidity now—only raw tension, worry, and a savage, all-or-nothing focus.
Sweat rolled from that person's temple onto Scar's bloodstained clothes.
It was Vito.
Vito's legs trembled as he supported him. Vito's eyes, reflecting the blood and dusk, looked down with a complicated mix of fear and fierceness.
A brief stunned silence fell over the street. Only the wind—and from the distance, the sticky-sounding noise of something crawling—were audible.
Scar knew every bystander's gaze had fixed on them: two ragged, bleeding companions, one desperately propped up by the other.
The performance, in a way the two hadn't planned, continued. Something more real and fragile than acting had quietly surfaced on the filthy street as night thickened amid the blood.
Scar struggled to hold onto his blurring consciousness.
Sweat seeped from his forehead and temples, mixing with the slow, steady blood into a warm, sticky paste that blurred his eyes and crept into the cracks at the corners of his mouth.
The world before him was a swaying mosaic of red and black blotches and shifting light.
He forced up the relatively clean back of his hand and wiped away the sticky film around his eye sockets.
For a fleeting instant his vision cleared—and he met Vito's gaze.
In those pupils, cast with the deepening dusk and the scattered distant lamps, Scar saw his own reflection—half his face caked in gore, the wound gaping grotesquely, the remaining skin pale and bloodless, hair matted into clumps, eyes bloodshot from pain and strain—a bloody monster clawing back from hell's edge, or else being dragged into it.
That image—gruesome and raw—felt worth it.
Then Vito, who had been supporting him, suddenly lifted his head. His Adam's apple bobbed violently, as if he had swallowed his cowardice whole.
His gaze slid from Scar's face to sweep the silent, varied expressions around them. When he spoke, his voice was no longer dry and trembling; it carried a hoarse, ringing defiance born of being driven into a corner—a desperate, smash-the-pot kind of cry:
"How much longer must we endure! Look around you—!"
Vito's free arm flung open in a wide arc, pointing at every blurred figure around them. "Look! How many of these are people you know?! The one haggling next door yesterday, the one who shared half a stale flatbread by the wall the day before… Where are they?! Where the hell have they all gone?!"
Scar's blood-streaked reflection vanished from his eyes, replaced by Vito's hard jaw and the profile of a man shouting with everything left in him.
Hah… Scar thought dizzily. His consciousness—like a waterlogged cord—sank bit by bit, but Vito's sudden outburst gave him a warped sort of satisfaction.
He was doing the part convincingly.
Yet apart from Vito's hoarse, unnervingly clear shout, Scar could hear nothing else.
No echoing agreement, no angry response, not even the faint whispering he'd expected.
The scene seemed drained into the dusk. A deathly hush reigned—only the wind and a ringing in his ears that grew louder and louder.
Damn them… a surging fury at the bystanders rose inside Scar—hotter than pain or dizziness. I've bled for this, cracked my skull open, and all I get is mute onlookers? No—this can't be the end.
The desperation and unwillingness to accept defeat crowded over him. He tried to speak; his dry lips adhered briefly before parting.
His face itched—scabs forming? nerves twitching?—he didn't know. He simply wanted to say something, to shatter the damned silence.
But what to say? Vito had already thrown out the panic about missing people. What flame to light next? "Fight them" might be too blunt and scare off the timid.
He made a hoarse noise in his throat but couldn't form whole words.
His mind was a sodden wad of cotton.
Vito, evidently short of words too, after shouting his lines, heaved for breath, cheeks flushed.
Facing the still-silent crowd, he opened his mouth but didn't immediately produce a stronger rallying cry.
He gripped Scar harder.
Then, as if to avoid dead air and to keep the faint focus alive, he began calling Scar's name over and over—forcefully—his voice carrying real anxiety and a performative sorrow:
"Scar! Hold on! Scar! Look! Everyone's here! Don't close your eyes! Don't leave us—!"
Those words were less for the crowd than for the companion in his arms—a mantra to steady himself and Scar.
Scar inwardly sighed: serves us right. Two fools thought that a little blood and a couple of shouts would unfreeze Darenz.
The stage was set, the blood spilled—but the audience merely watched, perhaps mocking inwardly.
A cold, numbing despair started to creep down into his bones.
At the instant the silence and Vito's monotonous calls seemed set to continue forever, two voices pierced the dusk from the crowd's edge—almost simultaneously, but starkly different:
"We… what should we do?"
The first voice sounded mature, weary, hoarse, but clear and loud—less an outcry than a long-suppressed question finally let loose.
The second came after—a younger, trembling, sharp note:
"Is surviving… just hope? Like this?!"
That question cut like a blade.
Boom—!
It was as if a spark had landed on a heap of dry kindling.
In an instant, the frozen silence ignited.
Whispers burst like a hive—no neat chant, but chaotic, excited, the sound of long-suppressed grievances finding a vent:
"Yeah… what do we do?!""My neighbor Jorlsen—gone since last month…""Hope? This hellhole—hope?""Who are they? Who's attacking?!""We can't keep taking this!""Right! We can't!"
Voices exploded from every corner, weak at first, then layering, converging, heating.
Gazes stopped being mere stares; they flared with anger, fear, and the faint, dangerous shape of solidarity.
The crowd pressed forward—not dispersing, but closing in.
Faces, lit by waning light, now read out the same story: long-suffered hardship and a sudden flame of revolt.
Vito froze, still holding Scar.
His eyes widened at the sudden, surging response—disbelief and wild joy mixed on his face. Scar, whose awareness had been slipping, felt that wave of voices yank him back a thread of clarity.
Had it worked?A part of him wondered—maybe the trick had worked.
Not from their crude acting, but from those two perfectly timed questions that struck the fuse soaked in oil.
Hope? Or a larger, more dangerous conflagration?
Scar didn't know.
He only knew the blood hadn't been spilled in vain.
The solo performance had finally become a chorus.
"Waaah—!!!" A terrified infant in a woman's arms let out a heart-wrenching wail, its innocent yet purely fearful cry cutting sharply through the chaos.
"Damn it all! Fight them!""Who?! Who exactly is behind this?!""Stop pushing! My child!!"
Curses, questions, cries, shouts… countless voices surged from all directions like a breached dam, colliding, stacking, escalating.
Even amidst the ever-growing roar, Scar's ears, half-clogged by blood, caught a few dull and terrifying thud! thud! sounds—was it a blunt object striking flesh, or smashing wooden planks and clay pots? He couldn't tell, but the violent malice in those sounds was clear enough to make his shattered consciousness shiver.
These sounds—shrill screams, infant wails, furious shouts and curses, blunt heavy strikes—interwove together, forming a chaotic, savage, yet frighteningly life-filled clamor, swirling incessantly, madly, in his ears.
Darenz's suffocated dusk had been ripped open by this sudden, angry, clamorous surge.
Night poured through the tear like an oncoming tide.
It worked. The blood had not been for nothing.
But the euphoria lasted only a breath before a black veil began to lower.
Dizziness turned into a rolling spin; the clamoring around him warped and receded, as if seen through thick, water-logged glass.
Vito's solid support faltered, the contact between them thinning. Scar felt his last fragile thread of consciousness snap.
No… not now… he thought, clawing at the idea that success was so near—so very near.
Desperation tore at him, drawing a last scrap of strength. He didn't know where he found it, but his hand—dirty, blood-slick, trembling—lifted, fingers curling toward the murky, swaying sky as if to clutch the vanishing "success" or to beg the indifferent heavens.
His lips moved, using the last of his muscle control to squeeze out two broken syllables—barely audible:
"Save… save…"
Then everything went black.
Complete, absolute darkness—so complete that even despair could not lodge there.
He felt the last shred of solid support vanish.
After that, a strange sensation: not falling, but being gently lifted—borne upward by an invisible tide into a deeper, colder abyss.
The shouting, the blood, Vito's possible cry, the crowd's roar—all Darenz's sounds and textures peeled away like a curtain.
Only the final, stubborn ember of not giving up flickered in the extinguishing mind—then it too was swallowed.
His raised hand fell limp. Blood dripped slowly from his fingertips.